The poor slave, on his hard, pine plank, but scantily covered with his thin blanket, sleeps more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclines upon his feather bed and downy pillow.
In his autobiography, Douglass contrasts the peaceful sleep of an enslaved person with the troubled rest of a wealthy, self-indulgent individual.
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No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
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The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.